Within a few
weeks, beginning with the announcement scheduled for Monday, I suspect people
will be talking about the amazing "Microsoft comeback".

Have
you personally seen Xbox 360? I'm running Vista and Office 12. I own an HTC and a Wizard and can't
figure out which one I love more. And I can't even talk about the most exciting
stuff on the plate.

The
world at large hasn't seen any of this.

I
couldn't help get LL Cool J's song out of my mind all
weekend. Please, don't call it a comeback. We've been here for years.

Described as the fastest Web browser available on any platform, Opera
pioneered several features that we now take for granted, including tabbed
browsing. The latest version--code-named Merlin--is full-featured with an inline
search box, a password manager, integrated security features, an integrated
email and newsgroup client, and facilities for navigating its entire interface
via voice or keyboard.

Opera freed its browser to better compete with Mozilla Firefox, a free
browser alternative that has managed to secure more than 8 percent of the market
over the past year. By comparison, Opera, which has been around for 10 years,
has garnered only 1 percent to 2 percent of the overall browser market. Web
browser experts have often hailed Opera's superiority to Firefox and
market-leader Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), but the earlier policy of
charging for the privilege of using the product turned away many users. Now
Opera hopes to make up the lost income from paid users via a link to Google in
the search box.

My guess is that this would dampen Firefox's momentum since switchers from IE
now have an option of either Opera or Firefox.

Ever since I attended the FOSS conference a couple of weeks ago, I've been
trying to figure out how viable an option Open Source is for the software
industry as well as developing countries like ours.

Every trail of thought that I could think of led to the same place and
today's Open
Enterprise column on InfoWorld nails it. The answer is: "Without
licensing fees to fall back on, pure open source companies may be limited to
imitating proprietary vendors' successes".

Now that everyone has seen how Microsoft is innovating in the next versions
of Vista, Office, .NET (Linq) it definitely proves Neil's theory:

Let's say this is the shape of the software industry for the next 10
years. A proprietary company comes up with an innovative idea and it's
successful. The open source community scrambles to duplicate this idea.
Eventually the open source version matures, it catches on, the product category
becomes commoditized, and customers gravitate toward the lowest-cost option.
Meanwhile, a new innovative idea has come along. Rinse, repeat.

Bill Gates told CNet, "The industry will always be a mix of free and
commercial software." If he's finally fine with that, is it good enough for us,
too?

Ahh.. Feels so sweet to be back online. My hosting server got screwed up and
I had to wait till Madura got back to work to fix it up. Wierdly, all that was
needed was to just start up the IIS service. Grr... why didn't I look into
that.

Lot's of stuff has been happening since I was offline. The Tech.Ed site (www.teched.lk) went live, registrations have now
opened for Tech.Ed. Loads of very, very cool stuff planned. Even more loads of
giveaways. Boy, this is going to be a whole lot of geek goodness.

I just found out from Madura that Kavinda
left for Boston in the morning today and I was thinking that he was leaving
tonight. Hope he finds time to blog from there.

My cousin brother Tarin got married week before last (my brother and I were
the 'best-men'), the count-down to my wedding has started (that's right folks
Jan 28th '06 is my D-Day).

Ed was down
here last week for a couple of days and spent a whole day with me taking me
through all the stuff that I should know about as a Developer Evangelist. I keep
pinching myself that I am now a Microsoftee and a Developer Evangelist at that
too. What can I say, I'm super excited!

During lunch today I was joined at my table by Rasmus Lerdof (the creator of PHP) and Jim
Zemlin the executive director of FSG (Free Standards Group). Jim is the guy who
pushes the Linux Standards Base and tries to ensure that Linux doesn't fragment
the way that Unix did.

Both Rasmus and Jim were enjoying their stay in Colombo and Jim was
really into the Sri Lankan culinary, he was going for seconds as well which is
quite rare given how spicy Sri Lankan food generally is.

The session following lunch was taken by the lively Danese Cooper from
Intel. Danese has a funky unofficial title as the Open Source Diva and one of
her key achievements was to lobby Sun into open sourcing Open Office during the
time she was employed there.

The session that is currently in progress is by Hugo Wisidagama, the director
of MNet. MNet is a local software service
company that is focused on providing services based on open source service.
Their unique business model is built on selling their expertise on various open
source software stacks to companies.

I was able find a power socket at the end of the room where I was able to get
my notebook charged again and guess what Dr. Ruwan from the Colombo University
too was running around trying to get his notebook charged too.

The Prime Minister who was supposed to be the Chief Guest was a no show due
to his presidential campaign (and don't let me get started on yesterdays fiasco
where all the roads were blocked, it took me fours hours to get home!) instead
Prof. Tissa Witharana the Minister of Science and Technology turned up and read
out from a scripted note. The other speakers included Prof. Samaranayake and
Manju Hathotuwa of the ICT Agency who spoke
about what ICTA is doing to take ICT to the masses. I must say that I'm pretty
impressed with how far reaching these were.

After a tea break the CXO conference kicked off with Dr. Sanjiva's Welcome
Note where he gave an introduction to FOSS and what it was all about. Dr.
Sanjiva though iterated the fact that Free software does not mean free as in
'Free of Cost'.

I'm right now listening to the Manager of the Open Source Lab from IBM, India
who's going into detail on all the open source projects that IBM has been
contributing to.

We will be holding the September User Group Meeting today at the Gateway
Auditorium at Cotta Road. A fresh new face will be talking today and this guy is
a SQL Server junkie, just check out Dinesh's blog (http://spaces.msn.com/members/dineshpriyankara/)
and you'll know.